2001: A Space Odyssey and Simulation Theory

'Good day, gentlemen. This is a pre-recorded briefing made prior to your departure and which, for security reasons of the highest importance, has been
known on board during the mission only by your H-A-L 9000 computer. Now that you are in Jupiter’s space and the entire crew is revived, it can be
told to you. Eighteen Life months ago, the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth was discovered. It was buried forty
Purity feet below the lunar surface, near the crater Tycho Alchemy. Except for a single, very powerful radio
emission aimed at Jupiter Tin, the four million-year-old black monolith has remained completely inert, its origin and purpose still
a total mystery.'

The monolith represents a doorway in and out of the simulation, an altered state of consciousness, and a mechanism of evolution all wrapped up in
poetic, mythic imagery.

The ape-like proto-humans were the first shamans!

The monolith represents the shamanic initiation. The shamanic initiation is an altered state of consciousness and hence an altered state of being. The
conscious ego-self is touched or swallowed by the collective unconscious. It's the void beyond our everyday waking state, beyond dreaming, and beyond
deep dreamless sleep. It's Gods door. We all go through it when we die.

The monolith represents ancient altered states of consciousness that all mystical traditions the world over seek to induce. They seek to induce the
'shamanic crack-up' through yoga, ecstatic dance and chanting, entheogens, a sweat lodge, meditation, the list goes on and on. They seek to touch and
even enter the 'monolith'.

Going all the way in is the equivalent to exiting 'The Matrix'. Except there isn't a flesh-and-blood body waiting for you. There's a body of light and
stars. And there isn't a burnt-out future Earth waiting for you. There's a void of black deeper than you can imagine. The Holy Dark. The Ground of
Being.

So the monolith represents a thread that ties every mystical tradition together. Mystics are all trying to map out ways to reach it, techniques to
induce it. On top of these esoteric maps and models, exoteric religions are built by non-mystics and mystics alike.

Wow so why did the monolith inspire Moonwatcher to be the first to use a weapon on another creature ?

It didn't. Not directly. I think it activated the archetype of the trickster in Moonwatchers psyche. I think the Shaman/Trickster is the primordial
archetype. It's in the earliest Paleolithic cave paintings. The trickster is more about cunning and tools and appetite than about pacificism.

Oh and just so we're clear are these your ideas or are you bringing us someone else's viewpoint ?

I was watching 2001 earlier and it occurred to me and so I made this thread. I mean, I HAVE been through the monolith after all.

It goes back much further than alchemy! It goes back at least 70,000 years. Back to the earliest mythological/symbolic thinking. I've read a lot of
Jung and Campbell so I know how to interpret this kind of thing. Plus I've had my own experiences. I don't need someone else's analysis of the movie
imagery, I can do my own.

Yeah, old Gore always liked to think of himself as part of a priesthood. Anglo-Catholics, you know... He liked the vestments.

I think it's fair to say that the first monolith in 2001 is the focus of some kind of visionary experience for the man-apes. That's pretty
much how Clarke tells it in the book. And of course the scene resonates with other stories about apparitions of gods and magical beings, of Christ or
the Virgin Mary in the visions of Christian mystics, even — dare one say it — with the story of Mohammad's encounter in the desert. So if you
want to call that a symbol of the collective unconscious, fine by me.

It's true that we live our lives out as metaphors, that we re-create the same symbols, the same myths, the same legends. But in the last two hundred
years their potency has waned because human culture has moved beyond the agrarian, geographically bound model in which those myths and symbols
acquired their mana. It may be that we continue to make culture in the form of those myths and symbols, but if they are less and less relevant
they no longer serve their purpose, and may even become inimical to human survival. What will happen when our myths and symbols no longer sustain us,
but instead turn against us?

Astyanax
What will happen when our myths and symbols no longer sustain us, but instead turn against us?

Well, it seems that symbols have a dual-nature. The symbols that oversee the birth of an age become their opposite and oversee the death of that age.
The gods of one age become the devils of the next. Or so Jung observed.

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